A typical electronic equipment cabinet includes a frame and a set of panels. The frame supports electronic equipment (e.g., power supplies, backup batteries, backplanes, circuit boards, etc.). The set of panels (e.g., doors, side panels, top panels, etc.) controls access to the electronic equipment supported by the frame (e.g., protects the equipment against damage, encloses the equipment to enable fans to generate an air stream to cool the equipment, etc.).
One conventional electronic equipment cabinet (hereinafter referred to as the “conventional rack mount cabinet”) includes an assembly of rigid horizontal and vertical metal beams that are fastened together to form a standard-sized frame. In particular, the metal beam assembly defines a standard width dimension for the cabinet (e.g., 19-inches) as well as defines uniformly-spaced, standard height attachment points (e.g., a standard 40-U rack) to enable vertical stacking of modularized equipment along the attachment points. Accordingly, such a cabinet enables equipment manufacturers to manufacture equipment as modularized components in common sizes (e.g., a standard-sized rack mount disk drive subsystem, a standard-sized rack mount power supply subsystem, etc.) for vertical integration with other modularized components within the rack mount cabinet.
Each modularized component typically includes, among other things, (i) a component chassis which mounts to the metal beams forming the standard-sized frame, (ii) circuitry which fastens to that component chassis, and (iii) a cooling subsystem. Users can then vertically combine modularized components from different manufacturers in a mix-and-match fashion within the rack mount cabinet to form an overall system (e.g., a data storage system, a network system, a general purpose computer system, etc.). To allow for such mixing and matching, for each modularized component, the manufacturer typically designs a separate and independent cooling subsystem to provide horizontal air flow from the front of the cabinet to the back of the cabinet through the chassis and across the circuitry of that modularized component to remove heat from that circuitry during operation.
For such a rack mount cabinet, the cooling subsystems of the rack mount modularized components work simultaneously to adequately cool the circuitry of the rack mount components when the rack mount cabinet resides adjacent an isle of cold air, i.e., a so-called “cold isle” location in which the cooling subsystems (i) draw air from an isle of cold air where system operators (e.g., technicians) typically reside and (ii) exhaust that air to an isle of higher temperature air at the back of the rack mount cabinet. The air at the back of the rack mount cabinet is warmer than that of the cold isle since it has absorbed heat as it passed horizontally through the cabinet and past the circuitry of the rack mount components in order to cool that circuitry. To facilitate such cooling, panels of the rack mount cabinet typically reside along the sides, tops and bottoms of the frame thus preventing air from escaping as it flows horizontally through the rack mount cabinet.
Another conventional electronic equipment cabinet (hereinafter referred to as the “conventional monolithic cabinet”) includes a custom-built frame that defines customized dimensions at different locations rather than uniform dimensions as in the conventional rack mount cabinet. Here, a single manufacturer has control over the entire design of the cabinet and its circuits. In particular, the manufacturer has the luxury of being able to set the customized dimensions so that individual components operate together in an efficient manner. For example, the manufacturer typically includes a single cooling subsystem for cooling all of the circuits within the entire cabinet to minimize costs for cooling the equipment. In one system that uses a conventional monolithic cabinet, the cooling subsystem resides at the top of the cabinet to draw air vertically through the custom-built frame and force the air out the top of the custom-built frame.